Stranded with My Forbidden Billionaire
Autorzy
Lucy King
Lektury
15,7K
Rozdziały
13
CHAPTER ONE
IF SOMEONE HAD told me six weeks ago that, come November, I’d be aboard a speedboat jetting towards Nick Morgan’s private island in the Indian Ocean, five thousand miles from my flat share in London, with the intention of requesting his help, I’d have stared at them in astonishment and asked what they were on.
For the sake of my older brother, Seb, with whom he’d been friends for years, Nick and I were just about civil to each other whenever our paths crossed, but we didn’t get along.
We’d met when he’d started at our exclusive boarding school in the same year as my brother. They were both thirteen and I was eleven. Seb and I were the children of a multimillionaire financier who had single-handedly funded the school’s new business studies centre. Nick was the clever son of a single mother, who had grown up in poverty and been awarded a free place. He found me impossibly spoilt and shallow, I knew, while I considered him absurdly aloof and uptight.
Since then, our fortunes had dramatically reversed but things between us were still as frosty as ever and, under normal circumstances, hell would have to freeze over before I’d ever seek him out.
But then I won one hundred and eight million pounds on the national lottery—give or take a penny or two—and was very nearly scammed out of half of it, and that changed everything.
‘You need proper professional help, Millie,’ Seb told me when I rang him in a panic, my heart pounding and my palms sweating as the delayed shock of the win, the near miss I’d had with the fraudsters and the realisation of how suddenly vulnerable I was on so many fronts finally hit home. ‘Get in touch with Nick. He does this sort of thing for a living and he’s extremely good at it.’
Seb was right. Over the last decade, Nick had made a fortune from dishing out top-level financial advice and the sales of products he’d developed off the back of it. He’d started his career as an advocate of the high risk, high reward way of making money on someone else’s payroll before switching to a slower, steadier approach to wealth management when he set up on his own. He’d developed an unshakeable reputation for both ability and trustworthiness and, grudgingly, I had to admit that if anyone was the man for the job, it was probably him.
There was just one teeny tiny problem.
‘Nick hates me,’ I said, recalling with a shiver the hard set of his jaw and the chill that appeared in his slate-grey gaze whenever he laid eyes on me these days.
‘He doesn’t.’
‘He does.’
‘Either way,’ said Seb, clearly reluctant to venture down that rabbit hole yet again, ‘how is that relevant?’
‘It might make him less inclined to help.’
‘I very much doubt that. The fees he’d earn would be astronomical. He won’t be able to resist.’
‘But he already has billions,’ I said, all too easily able to envisage a scenario where he coolly heard me out and then baldly refused, as if trying to make some kind of a point, to mete out an unnecessary lesson in humility, perhaps. ‘Is he that driven by money?’
‘He’s only driven by money,’ came the dry reply down the line from San Francisco. ‘But seriously, Mills, he’ll take care of you. He’s the man you need. Believe me.’
I didn’t need any man, least of all one who loathed me, nor did I want to be taken care of. When our father lost everything virtually overnight eight years ago, a month before my twenty-first birthday, I’d crash-landed in the real world. Among other things, I’d learned the importance of self-reliance and the value of independence, and now fiercely guarded both. And while men were fine for the rare occasion I fancied a spot of company on a cold night, the only proper boyfriend I’d ever had had unceremoniously dumped me the minute I became penniless. The experience had been crushing and I wasn’t keen to repeat it.
But one hundred and eight million pounds was a mammoth responsibility. I knew nothing of investments other than that as well as up, they could go down, down and down some more, and my brush with the scammers suggested I might possibly have inherited my father’s rash decision-making when it came to handling a fortune. I did need help, I had to admit. And, with Seb’s suggestion flashing like a beacon in my head and the unsolicited offers of advice from people I’d never heard of still coming in thick and fast, I’d eventually thought, better the devil you know.
So I’d emailed Nick, who informed me that if I wanted to see him I’d have to hop on a plane, and now here I was twenty-four hours later, halfway around the world, part furious that I was so desperate for his help I’d had to acquiesce to his summons, part relieved he hadn’t simply told me to get lost.
As the boat I’d picked up in Dar es Salaam sped across the sparkling sapphire water with James, the driver that came with it, at the helm, the small land mass shimmering on the horizon grew and solidified. I shaded my eyes against the bright sun that blazed in a cloudless sky and, in an attempt to distract myself from the nerves that were twisting my stomach because I had no idea of the reception I was going to get, focused on the scenery.
The glorious stretch of curving white sand beach fringed with palm trees that hove into view was like something out of a glossy brochure. It was perfect, alluring, and so mesmerising I barely noticed the water turning to a light jade in colour as it shallowed, or the boat gradually slowing. It was only when we bumped against something solid, jolting me out of my trance, that I whipped my head round to find out what was going on and realised with a quick skip of my pulse that we’d arrived and I had a welcome party.
Of one.
Nick.
Who was standing on the gently bobbing pontoon with his arms folded across his broad chest and looking at me with his habitual inscrutability.
His face was set, his eyes were dark and his jaw was rigid, but that was where the familiarity ended, I noticed, my mouth drying and my skin prickling in a most peculiar way as I took in the rest of his appearance. His usually immaculate hair was longer than normal, and ruffled. Instead of his customary tailor-made suit, he had on a pair of turquoise board shorts, patterned, no less, with a multicoloured tropical plant print. In place of the inevitable pristine white shirt that he always wore with the two top buttons undone was, of all astonishing things, a lemon-yellow polo shirt.
What was going on? I wondered, baffled and not a little unsettled by the unexpected sight of some toned tanned biceps and a pair of long, surprisingly muscled legs. So much colour. Such informality. Could he be ill? And where, in all that was holy, were his shoes?
‘Nick, hi,’ I said, parking these bewildering questions for later analysis and plastering on a bright smile while deciding to attribute the jitters bouncing around inside me to the long overnight flight.
‘A pleasure to see you as always, Amelia,’ he replied as he deftly caught the rope that James cast in his direction, and pulled it taut.
Despite the distracting flurry of activity and the impressive flexing of muscles, I tensed minutely and inwardly winced at the lie. At any lie, in fact. The closest, most important relationship of my youth—the one I’d had with my father—had turned out to be the biggest lie of all and these days I valued honesty, no matter how brutal.
So I didn’t reply with a socially conventional but meaningless ‘likewise’. But nor did I react to Nick’s use of my full name with my usual roll of the eyes, because at thirty thousand feet above Egypt I’d come up with a simple yet mature strategy for this meeting.
One, ignore the past and focus on the present.
Two, keep things professional at all times.
And finally, perhaps most importantly, stay calm and resist the temptation to respond to Nick’s dislike of me by instinctively exhibiting the silliness and superficiality he expected, in a sort of sticking two fingers up at him kind of a way.
Instead, I breathed in through my mouth and out through my nose, deeply and slowly and repeatedly, until the sulky teen in me had flounced off and I was channelling Zen-like serenity.
‘Thank you,’ I said smoothly, accepting the hand he held out and stepping off the boat and onto the pontoon.
He let me go abruptly and frowned down at the huge suitcase James was struggling to lift up and out. ‘How long are you planning on staying?’
‘Not long,’ I said, surreptitiously rubbing my hand against my skirt in an attempt to dispel the strange tingling sensation that lingered while Nick relieved James of his burden as if it weighed no more than a feather.
‘It feels like you’ve packed for weeks.’
‘Just a fortnight.’
He shot me a look, a flicker of alarm breaking through the ice-cool reserve, which meant he had to be seriously rattled by the idea. ‘A fortnight?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I assured him as he tossed the rope back to James. ‘I don’t intend to spend it here.’
Perish the thought. I knew when I wasn’t wanted. And it was fine. I was well used to being on my own, and actually, I preferred things like that. Experience had taught me relationships weren’t to be trusted. I’d learnt the hard way how fickle other people could be, when those I’d considered my friends, including my then boyfriend, had ghosted me at a time I’d needed them most.
I couldn’t even rely on family, I’d eventually come to realise. My father, whom I’d adored, had emotionally distanced himself the minute he’d discovered my mother was having an affair with her personal trainer and had decided to redirect all his efforts into winning her back. Thanks to my role in the breakdown of their marriage in the first place, my mother and I had a tricky relationship at the best of times, and my brother, the only person I might have been able to count on, lived five thousand miles and eight time zones away so was therefore more often out of reach than he was in it.
But none of that was anything new. I’d accepted it and adapted to it years ago. And if the self-reliance and the tough outer shell I’d developed meant that I allowed no one to get close, that I had no one to talk to about my hopes and fears, or anyone with whom to share my tumultuous and conflicted feelings about my lottery win, well, the occasional pang of loneliness was a small price to pay for self-preservation. True friendship, love of the romantic kind, marriage in particular, required a level of trust I simply couldn’t see myself ever embracing. Emotional involvement in anything only led to confusion, pain and heartbreak. It was far easier, far safer, for me and for others, if I steered well clear of all of it.
‘I wasn’t aware I’d invited you to,’ said Nick, his tersely made point snapping me out of my ruminations and obliterating the twinges of regret I nevertheless felt at the way things had turned out.
No, well, quite, I thought, determinedly pulling myself together. And thank goodness for it. Days of stilted conversation and keeping out of each other’s way? The tension and awkwardness would be unbearable and very much not my idea of a good time. ‘I’ve booked myself a room at a hotel on Zanzibar.’
At the best hotel on Zanzibar, in actual fact. Where, according to its website, Scandi minimalism met hints of the Middle East amidst twenty hectares of lush tropical gardens. Where, for my first holiday abroad in eight years, two weeks of pampering and indulgence awaited me, along with a waterfall bar, two infinity pools and a villa that came with a dedicated butler. Instead of schlepping to and from the office where I worked as a manager in the dark November mizzle, I’d be sliding on my sunglasses and trotting to my sun lounger with a book. There’d be long, blissful naps and lazy, luxurious massages. Yoga for breakfast and lobster for dinner, and, with any luck, a tan.
Just like old times.
Well, not quite like old times, perhaps. Old times would have also involved diving with my dad, the two of us gliding among the fish and the coral in the silky silence thirty feet beneath the surface of warm turquoise water, the connection and trust between us stronger than steel. Or so I’d always imagined, until amidst the wreckage of our misfortune I’d discovered that he wasn’t the hero I’d believed him to be, that the unique bond I’d thought we shared was nothing more than an illusion, that I didn’t actually know him at all...
But still.
I could hardly wait.
‘The helicopter’s coming to pick me up in an hour,’ I told Nick, shaking off the conflicting emotions of grief and loss, pain and betrayal that could still blindside me, even now, seven years, six months and twenty-one days after my father’s fatal heart attack, and dragging myself back to the present.
‘Good,’ he said flatly. ‘The quicker we sort out what you want from me and you go on your way, the better.’
He turned to stride back up the pontoon, my suitcase in his hand, while I stood there waving James off, his words ringing in my ears, suddenly feeling a little dazed, a little winded, and thinking that perhaps, on reflection, brutal honesty wasn’t quite all it was cracked up to be.
